If your team is struggling to meet deadlines and you need to choose a project management or task management platform to keep tasks on schedule, Jack Wallen walks through each tool and helps you choose the one that works best for you.
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Your team is busy and their to-do list is getting bigger and bigger over time. Whether developers, managers, operations staff, or other members of the IT field, these tasks can become difficult to accomplish. This is where the importance of using tools is highlighted to help these teams stay ahead of the curve in their day-to-day work.
With good management tools to help them manage projects and tasks, these teams will run efficiently and reliably.
But what type of tools does your team need? In this regard, you should consider two types of management tools:
- project management
- task management
You'd be surprised to learn that while these two tools have the same goals, they are quite different, and choosing the right tool to meet your team's needs can make a big difference. So let's examine both tools and see which one is best for your team.
What is project management?
Simply put, project management tools help your team manage projects. They help your team manage every phase of a project (from inception to closure).
Project management software helps you plan, organize and manage all the resources related to the project. Some better project management platforms include the following features:
- Project planning
- Task management
- Document sharing
- Collaboration
- Calendars and contacts
- Bug management
- Time tracking
Many project management software have similar interfaces, such as using Kanban boards or Gantt charts to manage the process of a project from start to finish.
What is task management?
As you may have noticed, project management tools include task management, so task management should be a good indicator of what you might need before you make a decision. What exactly is task management?
As you might have guessed, task management focuses on all aspects of a single task. Therefore, the idea behind task management is not to focus on the overall picture of project management, but to focus on finer granular tasks. With task management, your team will not worry too much about dependencies between projects as a whole, but focus on completing individual tasks What's needed, it doesn't mean task management is just a trivial to-do list because it gets done:
- task priority
- Assignments
- Set deadlines for tasks
- Track progress and delays
What is a dependency?
One of the biggest differences between the two is that project management has to take dependencies into account, and the best way to explain this concept is to break it down into four different dependency types, as follows:
- finish-start: task B can only start after task A is finished;
- start-start: task B can only be started after task A has been started;
- Done - Done: Task B can only be completed after Task A is completed;
- Start-Finish: Task B can only be completed after Task A has started.
Project management prioritizes dependencies while task management does not. In the world of task management, each task exists in its own silo, so it can be started and completed at any time.
Which tool best suits your needs?
The answer to this question is actually simpler than you might think, task management is best used for repetitive and independent tasks, and project management tools are suitable for the entire life cycle of complex projects.
example
Here is the shortlist for the project management platform:
Examples of task management platforms:
It should be noted that some project management tools, such as Trello and Asana, can achieve both project management and task management, but task management tools cannot meet the needs of project management. Finally, if you have a complex project to manage, you need a project management platform, and for simple tasks, a task management tool.
Original title: Task management vs. project management: Which is best for your team? , by Jack Wallen
Source of translation: 51CTO